Ve a nuestra portada Facebook TwitterInstagramPinterest]]>Pixar's 'Inside Out': The Importance of Being Sadtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.78169042015-07-17T12:46:02-04:002015-07-19T14:59:02-04:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

In the mad feudal kingdom of the blockbuster, where the franchise mainstream goes round and round like a moat clotted on its own conservatism, Pixar is the gentle genius, the cagey goose allowed to just get on with it and squeeze one out every few years. What lovely eggs, on the whole, this unfenced existence has produced. The consecutive trio of Wall-E, Up and Toy Story 3 is as impressive a run from any production stable in cinema history. The quality of the next three dipped (noble failure Brave, greedy sequel Cars 2, funderwhelming Monsters University), but then out pops Inside Out. Even by Pixar's heaven-storming standards, it is their strangest, cleverest, most tonally daring yet; it is also, already, one of the great American films about childhood.

The film's heroine-and-setting is Riley, a chirpy twelve-year-old who loves ice hockey as much as she hates broccoli. Her parents (like at the start of Spirited Away) move away from home for work reasons, in their case from Riley's beloved Minnesota to San Francisco. She struggles to settle in, both at school and at home, and her mood swings are told through the five anthropomorphic emotions in her head: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear. Each, like the Seven Dwarves, has their own personality. Amy Poehler is basically Lesley Knope as Joy, a relentlessly chipper team player. Joy's diametric opposite Sadness is voiced with shy warmth by The Office's Phyllis Smith, alongside a third Greg Daniels stablemate, Mindy Kaling, as Disgust. (It's a delight how neatly the sharp, playful spirit of Parks and Recreation and The Office has seeped into bankable cinema, with Chris Pratt's rise the apogee). As Joy and Sadness wrestle for control of Riley's moods during a particularly tough day at school, they are catapulted into the deeper confines of her psyche. They must make it back to HQ before Riley (guided only by Anger, Disgust and Fear) follows through with her drastic plan to recapture her younger, happier self (no spoilers here).

For starters, the visual lacework of the film is dizzyingly intricate, an infinity-library of dreams, memories and phobias, a double helix of authenticity and invention. Pixar consulted psychologists to help design Riley's mind in a scientifically accurate way: short-term memories made during the day are converted into long-term memories during sleep (as is believed to happen), and the curved shelves of Long Term Memory mimic the contours on the cerebral cortex of the brain's outer surface. This psycho-legitimacy is overlaid with flights of surrealism Dalí himself would twinkle at (Dalí and Walt Disney once made a short together called Destino). Vast bridged islands represent Riley's defining characteristics, like her love of ice hockey and her goofiness; these pillars pump personality into her decisions with varied levels of conviction, and crumble if she grows out of them. The train of thought is an actual train that moods and memories board and leave. Dreams are made in the mind's own weary film studio, a Buñuelian nod to cinema's ability to manipulate, distort, and quench fantasies. There are unseasonably clever gags about abstraction and fragmentation and déjà vu, thickly accoutred romps in the highest terrace of consciousness. Cars 2 this is not.

If this complexity sounds too smart for its own good, the cinematic equivalent of carting your child round the Tate when they've barely learnt to speak, it should be said Inside Out is funny and thrilling and wears a trim, throwaway savvy, the sort of cross-generational irreverence you get on The Simpsons or Sesame Street. There's a naughty self-awareness: Anger at one point suggests "we lock ourselves in our room and use that one swear word we know. It's a good one!" When Fear is on control desk nightwatch, he rolls his eyes at the predictability of the nightmares ("Let me guess, she forgot to put on her pants"). The rapid-rattle insights into other characters' minds at the end, including a disenchanted clown ("six years of drama school... for this"), shows how much hay Pixar made just in Riley's mind and how much they could make with others'. There's even a little skewer at San Francisco's hipster culture with the pizzeria that has a choice of just one pizza a day.

All of this slightly reminded me of Silicon Valley, the gloriously intelligent, likeable sitcom about five symbiotic cohabitants trying to make it in San Francisco and a timely anti-Entourage (not to kick a man when it's down, but please watch if you haven't already the Entourage cast's bewilderedly unapologetic, legs-on-the-pouffe round-table with The Guardian about the film's sexism). Inside Out's lightness of touch goes hand-in-hand with a sort of gentle feminism (the three main characters - Joy, Sadness and Riley - are female and Riley's only hint of a love interest is nicely subverted). Compare that with fellow labyrinth-of-the-mind dream-feast Inception, an unprecedented cathedral of creativity, but so male and portentous and my God does it take itself seriously.

The most striking element is how moving Inside Out is. I cried three times, two of which involved Riley's imaginary friend Bing Bong (a deliberately confused cross between a cat, an elephant and a dolphin). He becomes Joy and Sadness's guide around Riley's dustier psychic recesses and a metaphor for her younger self. This is a dense, cathartic, mature illustration of growing up that champions the vitality of melancholy. At first Sadness just drifts about and gets in the way, touching memories she shouldn't. But she becomes increasingly useful and cheers Bing Bong up much more effectively than Joy. Crying, as Sadness says, "helps me slow down and obsess over the weight of life's problems". Her virtuoso performance at the end, just thinking about which makes me want to weep, is a gorgeously introspective complement to the pop-cultural party line to let it go or shake it off. It's alright not to let go immediately. Keep it, dredge it in, swim in it, savour the shoreline air, and (if you can) try and learn from it (or not). "In order to enjoy life", wrote Nabokov in Speak, Memory, "we should not enjoy it too much." The film organises raids on one's sense of lost childhood, assaults that scrape the thatch of soul behind the larynx: the erosion of Riley's capacity for silliness when her dad is trying to cheer her up with monkey impressions is one of them. It's an adagio of inarticulacy, a well-tempered sonata of bad tempers, up there with Boyhood and (my favourite children's book of all) Bad Mood Bear.

Like memories and people, the film isn't perfect. There's a sag in the middle, an iffy family-argument-as-war sequence that strays into fatigued gender stereotypes, and Joy and Sadness get lost for about ten minutes too long. But it never feels sentimental, and it's even aware of its own ability to manipulate (hence the dreams-as-cinema-studio motif). Pixar, for all its cute-and-cerebral charm, is as well-oiled a PR machine as any (the Inside Out five are currently flogging the latest Sky broadband bundle), but it's somehow more palatable than most contemporary brands.

Back in the day, nostalgia was seen as a disease (there was an "outbreak" in the Russian army in 1733). If this were the case now, Hollywood would be gripped with a nervous malady. Ever since the superhero adaptation became the all-consuming American art form (Birdman pecked at this idea, but told it from too privileged a perspective), studios have plunged into their own mythology, placed the surest bets and trussed them up as films. Of course they were going to make another Jurassic Park, of course they were going to make another Terminator, of course there's a new Mission Impossible ("Rogue Nation"). You can understand why people whose jobs depend on it greenlight the safest gambles, but as a viewer it's that much harder to care about the characters, or even treat it as a "film" (or, God forbid, a piece of art), when you know it's a giant lumbering bastard of a calculated financial investment. Please make money, please! It also makes those who take a punt on characters and stories created from scratch even more commendable.

That's why I love that Pixar would allow a premise as weird, emotionally nuanced and shamelessly sophisticated as Inside Out's. What a wonderful, reasonable, unusual message it has, the most shaded of happy endings. Tomm Moore, director of the lushly ambitious Irish animation Song of the Sea, said in this month's Sight and Sound, "Is there such a category as family arthouse? I worry that we're seen as somehow worthy and improving, like the cinema equivalent of broccoli." Inside Out is broccoli that tastes like ice cream, nutritious comfort-cinema. With Looking and Silicon Valley it's part of a San Franciscan crucible of decency, subtlety and originality. It's a celebration of imagination-as-empathy, where sadness is not only a character but a hero; it's a film about the melodrama of pre-puberty and the formation of personality, where maturity constitutes the acceptance of change. It's one of the great artistic representations of the young mind, its mountains thickening with the thunder of memory, a point-counterpoint to the minimalism of Up's magisterial life-in-a-montage.

But it's particularly a fable about nostalgia, or first reaching the age where you have anything to be nostalgic about. It's so tempting to cling on or loiter in the lagoons of the past, but to be defined by it is unnatural, unhealthy and the least constructive kind of inward. The Hollywood tastemakers could learn from this. If only they left alone the dilapidated pillars of previous successes they might, in the words of the nineteenth century French nostalgia-doctor Hippolyte Petit, "find new joys to erase the domination of the old." By letting go, Disney have made their finest film since The Lion King.]]>'The Comeback': The Most Underrated Comedy of Modern Timestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.65367342015-01-24T09:50:32-05:002015-03-26T05:59:01-04:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

"Did we force ourselves on you, or you on us?"

(Goethe, Faust: Part One)

The best television about television is the saddest. Larry Sanders is the Great American Sitcom, a sourly unimpeachable Moby Dick of shaded, disconsolate shits. The closest British equivalent, Alan Partridge, gets even better as Alan ages, and latest series Mid Morning Matters, with its webcam POV and almost Beckettian economy, is the subtlest, most claustrophobic yet. But very few other shows-about-shows, as snappy and stuffed with cameos as they might be, fully shake off the non-jeopardy of Rich People's Problems (let's exclude Chris Morris for the moment, or it's not fair on anyone).

The territory with the least appreciated melancholy, perhaps, is reality TV. One of The Office's masterstrokes was it tapped into the (at the time) growing, Warholian trend of shows from which people became famous for being themselves rather than playing a fictional character. The genre is now so gargantuan it has started to feed itself, where the contestants of I'm A Celebrity and Celebrity Big Brother are increasingly alumni from other reality shows. Yet the most intelligent reality television, like Channel 4's First Dates, works tragicomic muscles the best scripted shows don't even have. The Alzheimer's widower who goes to the loo to comb his hair, or the silence of the rejection-phobe turned down at the end of his first date in years, is the stuff of high literature, as elegantly carpentered as Alice Munro or Raymond Carver, but smoked and knotted with real life.

So what of the people who make it, or the production line of eccentrics it chews and gobs out? No scripted show has emulated the mad-as-hell, hand-of-the-producer prescience of Network (1976), or the voyeuristic, puppet-mastered empathy of The Truman Show (1998), though Black Mirror hints at both. None has really investigated the diabolical pact fame-for-fame's-sake makes with identity and whether this is always a bad thing (in Grayson Perry's superlative Who Are You?, for instance, ex-X Factor contestant Rylan eloquently describes 'Rylan' as a character, the flamboyant, emotionally bulletproof embodiment of what "little Ross from Bethnal Green" wanted to be). But then along comes The Comeback, which somehow, masterfully, captures the whole damn lot.

After a nine-year hiatus, the show returns for a second series, which went out in the US on HBO before Christmas and is due imminently in the UK on Sky Atlantic. The first series (originally broadcast in 2005 and now available on Sky On Demand) is a masterpiece of discomfort, an unusually necessary mockumentary that probes at the root canals of fame. It focuses on Valerie Cherish, an actress who had her own show in the nineties and hasn't had a hit since. After winning a supporting role in execrable new sitcom Room and Bored, a reality camera crew agree to follow her comeback, with rather less reverence than Valerie signed up for.

Lisa Kudrow, who wrote and created The Comeback with former Sex and the City showrunner Michael Patrick King, is just astoundingly good as Valerie. The sea of fame has soaked her heart through, but the prospect of airtime kindles an underground fire of ambition. Every laugh, every tic, every self-determined catchphrase ("Hello hello hello!") is so impeccably contrived that Valerie becomes a sort of grim, flappy mannequin: she picks and twitches at malign ambiguities, twines her career stresses around her marriage, squitters her insecurities over the wailing wall of fame. Not since Brent has a mockumentary character been so aware, so mortifyingly aware, of the camera. In Valerie's desperation to curate the way she comes across, she unlades her self-doubts in spine-thrills of embarrassment. The mask, to bastardise Updike, has eaten into the face and already wants seconds. It is one of the TV performances of the century.

Valerie, and Kudrow as Valerie, would be enough, but the river of characterisation runs deep. Some are in Val's corner: Valerie's patient businessman husband Mark (Damian Young); spry stylist Mickey (Robert Michael Morris); benevolent writer Tom (Robert Bagnell); Val's "baby girl", smarter-than-she-lets-on superstar-to-be Juna (Malin Akerman). Others are very much not, and two especially. Reality TV producer Jane (Laura Silverman) is Valerie's sly Mephistopheles, a duty-of-carefree agent provocateur who teases out clownish extremes and bedevils Valerie with questions, obfuscating her narrative intent and accelerating the half-realities that fit. Their relationship becomes a scornful symbiosis and the final scene of the first series, in which they hug, is both optimistic and exceptionally depressing.

But Val's most monstrous adversary is showrunner 'Paulie G' (Lance Barber), a tempestuous, leering, portly king-of-the-bullies. What an exquisite bastard he is. His eyes are leprous and winedark stones, his lips slopping eels of contempt, his wit serrated with rusty nihilism. He makes Val's life hell and she, misguidedly, spends too much time trying to win him round.

There is a third game of cat-and-mouse, and that is with the camera as objective observer. The first series takes the form of the unabridged footage, the 'rushes', of Valerie's comeback (in the final episode, we see the edited end product). The second series, without giving too much away, is an amateur film-school project that morphs into something more insidious. Again, we see the unfiltered footage, and it might be even better than series one, as the scope broadens and the stakes heighten. The final, hour-long episode is particularly ambitious, stamped with an almost Biblical virtuosity, and one brief moment towards the end (where Valerie tries to order a cab) is as tender and helpless a career highpoint for Kudrow as the last scene of Captain Phillips is Tom Hanks'. No more clues, except that Seth Rogen has a lovely, extensive cameo as 'Seth Rogen', cast to play the part of a writer based on (and, ominously, written by) Paulie G.

In reality TV, there are so many layers of truth - the second-guessing, self-filtering and pre-emptive admissions of the contributor; the potential simplification, omission and distortion of character traits in the edit - that it's almost impossible to tell where reality starts and artifice begins. What even is reality? How real is it possible to be if you know there's a camera on you, especially if you're a professional performer (played by a professional performer)? Over the course of series one, Valerie becomes a pollutive undermemory of what she was, stippled with guilt. Her personality is like a reflection of her personality in rippling water, drenched down, the grey alive crushed underneath. She alienates her husband Mark, the least LA-contaminated character in the show, and over the second series the pained, funny-at-first kinks of their relationship only deepen. The script, especially in the scenes between Valerie and Mark, is so good it's invisible: the footage feels like life, so lifelike and intrusive you almost feel ashamed to watch it. Every performance is a mini-marvel of throwaway naturalism, and you can imagine them all out there when the cameras are off, most behaving rather differently.

The final reason this show is so bloody good is that, like Parks and Rec's Leslie Knope and Veep's Selina Meyer, its female central character is allowed to be funny. Valerie isn't there to laugh or frown at the men's jokes and impressions: the comic universe revolves around her. Husband Mark is a deliberately mysterious figure, a much more nuanced rework of the second-fiddle usually meted out to the wives in brom-coms. The show also satirizes the crammed maleness of Hollywood: the treatment of 'lady writer' Gigi, the crass stereotypes of shitcom Room and Bored, its justly glacial reception. Indeed, there's an internal, ironic juxtaposition between the ill-fated Room and Bored (two hot guys, two hot girls, one Aunt Sassy!) and the rather more original central double-act (a woman in her forties and a gay man in his sixties) of the show itself.

Comebacks seem to be in vogue. After Ben Affleck and the McConaissance, Michael Keaton has refeathered himself for 2015 with Birdman, a Cortázar-streaked twist on films-about-films. It doesn't always work (Sofia Coppola's Stephen Dorff woozathon Somewhere flew too near the sun of self-indulgence). But The Comeback has always been brilliant, a soaring, qualmless thrill, a hanging heaventree of identity, jealousy, companionship and the necrotic glare of the media. Please watch it on Sky Atlantic or buy it on DVD as a matter of urgency because, as an example of modern television, it is unimprovable.]]>'Mistaken for Strangers': The National of Music Documentariestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.55398512014-06-29T06:43:01-04:002014-08-29T05:59:06-04:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

"What makes you think I'm enjoying being led to the flood?"

(The National, 'Runaway')

The National are the most rigorous, literary and intensely elegant of contemporary American bands, a seething equipoise of baritone potency, earnest oddness and dark, drifting lyricism. They have matured impeccably from the melancholy promise of The National (2001) and Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers (2003) to the jagged, Joy Division-brushed purism of Alligator (2005) and Boxer (2007), then again to the refined heights of High Violet (2010) and Trouble Will Find Me (2013).

Their cryptic lyrics have waves of meaning and are steeped in a sort of enchanted realism: the slow show of empty flats, dusky swimming pools and lonely parties is the same province of short story virtuoso John Cheever, the "Chekhov of the suburbs" and a fellow fabulist of fractious relationships. Of all their songs, 'Pink Rabbits' is the masterpiece and the greatest break-up song of the century so far. If you don't know it, please listen to it immediately, then listen to it again, immediately.

As if The National couldn't be savvier, along comes Mistaken For Strangers, the most ingenious music film in years. Named after one of their songs, it is less about the band than the complexities of brotherhood, heightened when one is more famous than the other.

The National are composed of two pairs of brothers - Aaron and Bryce Dessner; Bryan and Scott Devendorf - plus frontman Matt Berninger. Matt also has a younger brother called Tom, a hugely likeable, slightly wayward amateur horror filmmaker redolent of a School of Rock-era Jack Black. When Tom gets a job as a roadie on The National's latest tour, he brings his camera with him and this lovely film is the roundabout, deceptively artful end product.

The camera becomes a symbol of creative rebellion against the dull subservience of merely being Matt's brother, an applauseless role that has defined Tom's life to date. Tom is often told to put the camera away by the testy tour manager when he should be doing something useful, like put out more towels. Where Tom is ramshackle, impulsive and inclined to have one beer too many, Matt is circumspect and disciplined: even his downtime has a curated minimalism, only seeming to clink a glass when it's with the elite likes of Werner Herzog or Emily Blunt, and there is a particularly emblematic moment where Tom is ushered out of a corridor so the band can pose for a photo with a certain Barack Obama.

Matt is a fascinating character: broadly supportive, serious (sometimes endearingly so, sometimes frustratingly so), particular, conscious of his image and capable of teasing Tom where it hurts. He is torn between inviting his brother in to his exclusive world and encouraging him to do his own thing, a dilemma explored in the recent, underrated HBO comedy Doll & Em: is it better to employ a loved one lower in the showbiz hierarchy, or not at all?

There are funny moments of fraternal bickering (Matt confiscates beers off Tom, scolds him for dropping cereal on the hotel bathroom floor, then again for bellowing at a celebrity neighbour). But even more interesting are the shards of psychological insight, especially those excised from Tom's interviews with his parents, two Cincinatti artisans (Mum's paintings are all over the walls, while Dad seems to be making something throughout his time on camera). Among the wry acknowledgements of Tom's childhood quirks, like his inability to finish anything, Mum concedes that she always thought Tom was the more talented son (cue a shot of his surrealist 'leg' cartoons) and Dad compares non-complainer Tom to the more fretful Matt.

There is also the comfort that Tom is not the only one cooling in Matt's shadow; there's an intriguing shimmer of narcissism when one of the Dessner twins bristles, just slightly, at being asked yet more questions about Matt rather than about himself.

During the final twenty minutes, Tom is at his most vulnerable. When Matt's wife Carin asks Tom if there are any romances on the horizon, Tom is defeatist. "I don't have the clothes, the dishes... I don't have anything." For all Matt and Carin's generosity, it can't be easy for poor Tom to live with such high-achievers (Carin is a former fiction editor of the New Yorker). Matt can come across as a bit stiff, a bit too emotionally blue-blazered, but he is genuinely, pragmatically protective of Tom and his advice has the aphoristic wisdom of his lyrics ("Lean towards the things that make you like yourself").

Of course, the jeopardy of the film not getting made is tempered by the fact that you're watching it, but this is just one of its many satisfying ironies. Despite his shambolic persona, Tom the director packs a hell of a lot into 75 minutes and, aside from everything else, there are some really accomplished sequences of the band on stage. We get the best of all worlds: an auteured concert film (in the vein of Martin Scorsese's Shine A Light or Shane Meadows' Made of Stone), with a deadpan, real-life absurdism unintimidated by rockumentary urtext This Is Spinal Tap and weighted with the timeless fraternal preoccupations of guilt, loyalty, tolerance and estrangement, like a hipster-generation East of Eden.

Smartest and freshest of all, though, is the film's self-awareness and even the most touching moments have a deliberate, tears-in-the-mirror vanity. In one of the film's best passages, Tom tells Matt that he filmed himself crying the night before, which makes Matt laugh affectionately: the very next scene is of Tom crying. You'd think the pathos would be blotched by the eczema of irony, with Tom as guilty of affected sadness as the "television version of a person with a broken heart" the band decry in 'Pink Rabbits'. But the moment is even more moving for it, and enhanced by Tom's realisation that he's never seen Matt cry. The film reverberates with these sorts of deft structural echoes and the audacious final sequence is, in itself, an apt metaphor for Tom and Matt's relationship, especially the triumphant final shot.

I don't know if Mistaken For Strangers is another of those documentaries, like Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here or Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop, where there's more jiggery-pokery with the truth than meets the eye. But I couldn't care less, because this film is already so many things. It is a National song, an oblique, heartening raid on the inarticulate; like a National song, it is a John Cheever story, in this case an inverted 'Goodbye, My Brother'. It is a metaphor for Tom's life, a quest to rearrange the post-it notes of his National-shadowed existence into some coherent, independent order. But however you look at it, Mistaken for Strangers is the sweetest, funniest, most cleverly composed film about music of recent memory and one of the most original films about brotherhood ever, set to the billowing backcloth of the classiest band in the world. Catch it while you can.]]>The Stag Do: A Beta Male's Taketag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.55198692014-06-23T06:15:48-04:002014-08-23T05:59:05-04:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

"I know thee, though thou art all filthy."

(Dante's Inferno, Canto VIII)

Before last Saturday, the only stag do I'd been on was my own father's. It was a sleepy, pints-and-darts affair in a pub, though there was a moment where Dad's four brothers persuaded him to stuff a whole egg in his mouth. Now it was the turn of my Zimbabwean friend Ben, whose brother Hugh sent out the invites and requested £37 from each guest for an unspecified activity. We were told to be at the Crate Brewery in Hackney Wick for 1:00pm on the appointed day and, ominously, to bring swimming trunks. A later message asked us to deposit our "shaved pubic hair into the pillowcase on arrival. Hugh, I assume you are bringing the tar?" I genuinely couldn't tell if this was a joke.

The Crate Brewery and Pizzeria is a lovely place, a gently hipster urban meadow rivering with the hope of early summer. Drizzle speckles the beer in its pitchers, but the beer doesn't mind. The canal, dappled with a light wind, peeps through the prison bars of its bridges and tempts cyclists in for a swim. Behind a cloud lurks the sun, that coy, ancient, bewildered god.

Then Ben arrives with three friends I don't know and they make him put on black pleather trousers, a fetish string vest and a fez; the deck shoes stay on. "Has anyone got any scissors?" shouts one of them. "I want to cut out the arse." Alas, no scissors.

With a thunderous clang, a rusty old barge crashes into a bridge. Huge cheers, and what about the symbolism? The Ballardian Rosie & Jim of our man-flock rear-ending the bridge of decency. "They're pirates!" someone roars, about the family on the barge. Is this offensive? (This question recurs like a heartbeat throughout the day). There's a non-committal murmur from the group, but no actual words, so he repeats: "They're like real-life pirates." He looks at me. "Yes, they are a bit."

After a few frothies and a conveyor belt of arthouse pizzas, a shy, pony-tailed woman called Jo arrives and says it's "our turn". Because I didn't buy a pitcher, I'm sent with two others to the off-license to buy "loads more beers". We end up with 48 cans of international lager, a World Cup of booze. On the street the three of us bump back into Jo, who leads us to an abandoned warehouse. It doesn't really have a door, but in we go.

We wend our way through the dusty labyrinth, Kiss FM from a distant radio our only compass. We eventually find the crucial door, the only door in the world. Bursting for the loo, I clank it open with my blue bag of beers and we descend.

There's too much to take in at once. A paddling pool. Twenty classroom chairs. Three women in bikinis. Twenty blokes, braying tipsily. Professor Green on the radio. Ben has stripped down to a pair of leopard-print boxers and one of the women squirts baby oil on him. He is summoned to the pool by two of the women, and the three of them start to wrestle.

A couple of minutes in, when Ben body-slams one of his opponents out of the pool, the third woman stops the fight and says it's against the rules to stand up: Ben must be punished. He is made to crouch down on all fours, his head viced between the legs of one of the women, and his leopard briefs are pulled down. "Has anyone got a belt?" Rapturous cheers! With Lachlan's brown Zara belt, Ben receives six of the best, the last a particularly clean pop. He pulls his pants back up for one more fight, then gingerly clambers out of the arena like a squid who's shit himself.

"Who's next?" Up jumps the alpha Goliath of the group, a bull-necked personal trainer utterly in his element and, by now, steaming drunk. Off comes the T-shirt, quick smother of baby oil, and he's in. His technique is more refined, if less flailingly unpredictable, than Ben's, but he's still beaten. Ben, as stag, gets to decide who's next and there's a quick changing of the guard as the referee swaps in for one of her colleagues. Ben points at me.

I do my best to get out of it, explaining that I haven't got any trunks, am talking to Rohit about the Indian elections and I still don't really know the rules. Amidst the chorus of boos, Ben's stepbrother throws a pair of swimmers at me:

"Put these on and get on with it."

I do as I'm told, in the grim "wet room" at the back (shower, loo, sodden copy of Nuts), and emerge to a hero's welcome. Another of the boys, a teacher who hasn't wrestled himself but has been watching closely, says the tip is to "keep them together". I trudge to the front and get in the ring with my two adversaries, who couldn't be nicer. Whilst plying me with oil, they explain that it's the best of three rounds, one man vs two women, and the aim is to strangle your opponent, with your arms or even your legs, until they concede defeat by tapping on the floor.

I lasted about three minutes, a blearily frenzied, lopingly unsexual mess. As you might expect from trained jujutsu fighters, they were very strong indeed and there was a particularly depressing moment, as I scampered about the ring to avoid another throttling, where I looked up and noticed nobody in the crowd was really even watching.

It is very strange how quickly the whole thing felt completely normal. After my bout, I had a quick shower and returned to my seat for the rest of the day's play, as if we were watching a Test match at Lord's. None of our lot beat the gladiators and, once our two hours were up, it was handshakes and photos all round.

"How many of these do you do a day?" I ask one of the women, thinking I was Louis Theroux. She laughs, with a glint of exhaustion. "This is our third today, and we've got two more."

Think, think you idiot! Think of a non-patronising question that allows her to say whether she sees this as a money-for-old-rope Saturday laugh, where pissed berks become easy punchbags, or whether she finds the whole thing, the oil, the shouting, those awful chairs, a bit weird.

"Gosh. Well, good luck."

Interview over, we say our goodbyes and pile onto the Overground, exactly the shambling, heaving bunch of tossers whose arrival in your carriage as a sober passenger makes your soul weep. Ben, between asking a Lithuanian girl what book she was reading and claiming he'd read it too, tells me and Rohit that we'd need collared shirts to get into the strip club and suggests we nip into Primark while they settle into a Soho pub.

Ro and I end up in a BHS changing room with a two-for-£25 office shirt deal that comes with a free tie, which Ro gallantly says I can keep. Wearing our new shirts out of the shop like a particularly exciting new pair of shoes, we find the chaps in the pub, a mellow antechamber before the next descent. We've had the vices of violence; now for the sex.

I've never been to a strip club before, but this one, somewhere near Piccadilly and twenty bob a head, was a hothouse of polluted gender politics, stereotypes of stereotypes, an end-of-the-pier tanker of anti-progress that leaves a slick seedier than baby oil on all those who enter. The alpha dandies launch into it with competitive aplomb, ordering private dance after private dance, while we betas are less forthcoming. At eleven they project the England-Italy World Cup match on a screen opposite the main stage, a bleakly apt sideshow of unattainable fantasies.

I don't want a private dance, because I already feel a bit sick and wouldn't know where to look, but I do want to Theroux a bit more. Each time I'm offered a dance I say no thank you, but try to ask the offerer whether they like it here. They all tow the party persona and say of course they do, though their reasons for doing it vary: one woman works here to fund a Master's, while another says it's the thing she's best at. Eleven sheets to the wind, as soon as the footy finishes I hug Ben and jump on the night bus.

I did a bit of thinking on the journey home. I thought about the sheer accidental expanse of the day, an all-encompassing Bloomsday of confused masculinity; the emotional vertigo of turning 27, that dire, mythical age when your Young Person's Railcard expires and you are no longer young, when friends' careers suddenly look rosier than yours and it's already too late to be any sort of prodigy, but still too early to have anything remotely wise to say about the world. I thought of the mind as a room, a palace behind one door, a prison behind the other. Then I had a kebab and fell asleep in front of Mrs Brown's Boys.

Before any sort of self-righteous conclusion, I want to make clear that I love Ben, absolutely love him and his easy wit and warmth and sense of mischief. I also really like all of his friends, many as sceptical as me, and don't judge their or anyone else's behaviour; I genuinely enjoyed their company all day and was extremely touched to be invited.

But, even with the prophylactic of irony, I found it very difficult to justify or laugh off Saturday's events to work colleagues on Monday morning without sounding like Jim Davidson. It is not particularly brave or original to question the ethics of strip clubs; instead, I'd question the way atavistic, rites-of-passage bloodsport-sexism has become a staple of the stag do, that parody of unaccountable, get-it-out-yer-system decadence, a moral black hole where women are paid by groups of men to parade themselves as objects of sex, violence or both.

Why did I wrestle? Why did I go to the strip club? Because it was Ben's day and I didn't want to be a stick in the mud. Dreadful excuses from a dreadful man. But there's something even less acceptable with the stag as a peer-pressure-cooker that forces these social Sophie's Choices, and now might be the time to dismantle it.

For my stag do, I've decided that I'm going to book a private area in a pub garden, buy twenty copies of the Sunday Times and we're all going to sit and read quietly over a few ales. Thence we might come forth to rebehold the stars.]]>'Locke', Godot and the Mystery of Modestytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.53362582014-05-16T09:10:48-04:002014-07-16T05:59:03-04:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

Since you ask, my favourite film of the year so far is Locke. It's Tom Hardy on the phone in a car on the M6 for ninety minutes, but it's a writer's delight, a freshwater spring of restrained eloquence, a palanquin of psycho-suspense. Hardy's performance as construction foreman Ivan Locke is incantatory; it soaks into the memory and tenses a tragic nerve. The Welsh accent lends a sort of Richard Burton gravitas, but it also clips and sustains the humour with a soft pedal. At one point, a character called Bethan (voiced by Olivia Colman) likens her hospital ordeal to Waiting for Godot, a new production of which opened at the Arcola last week. Fancy that!

(Oh, I see. You saw Locke weeks after it came out and, now it's too late to write a straight review of it and as you had tickets for a new version of Godot for the following day, you've cobbled together a piece about both. You wily bastard).

Ah, Waiting For Godot, that plumed, heaving masterpiece. A heaven-storming welter of ambiguity and dislocation, it scissors a pair of unlovely vagrants from a startled sky into the condemned arcade of a landscaped, windless chaos. Towing the exacting tastes of the Samuel Beckett estate, it has been readapted as a local response to social turmoil all over the world (Sarajevo, South Africa, New Orleans...) and reconditioned over the years for spirit-of-the-age double-acts (Robin Williams and Steve Martin; Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson; Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen; now Totally Tom). It was voted the most important play of the twentieth century by the National Theatre and has even been spoofed, flawlessly, on Sesame Street.

In its latest incarnation, director Simon Dormandy transposes Vladimir and Estragon to their twenties and to East London. Time drips and twitches, sleeps and dances, mocks and falls on the watch of esteemed art designer Patrick Kinmonth, whose rubble-puddled anti-set is a dystopian reverse of his work on Valentino's high-society swansong to Rome. Though baseball caps replace the bowlers, it's a deceptively retro production, swathed with music hall japes and sad-clowning, and a quirky addition to the canon.

Beyond his own writing, Beckett's ghost lives on and it reared again earlier this year in True Detective, especially during Matthew McConaughey's virtuo-soliloquy at the end of episode three, where he describes death as an unmistakable relief and life as a dream inside a locked room. There's the same play of light and dark, famine and feasting, a solitary man drowned in dreams and burning to be gone.

(Oh get on with it, for God's sake).

But back to Locke. There are echoes, bones of echoes, between Locke and Beckett: the almost algebraic rhythms, the bible-black humour, the careering claustrophobia. Locke owes most, perhaps, to Krapp's Last Tape, where distant voices represent the different fragments of a life. Locke's language is mostly pragmatic ("Check all the pumps yourself"; "Ring the council"; "What does it say on the whiteboard, Donal?"), but he flaunts a rugged poeticism for the art of construction (concrete is as "delicate as blood").

Many contemporary thrillers have a smallness of soul, a cavity of vision, all sound and surface. But Locke is a thoughtful exception. There are still cracks and hollows, but of the creative, deliberate kind and, as with Godot, you can pour the cement of your own interpretations into the ambiguities. For instance, Ivan Locke's car might represent his conscience, especially when he rages at the memory of his father. Or, the construction project Locke oversees from behind the wheel - with its meddling foreign investors and closed streets, the allure of posterity twinned with the potential for disaster - could be a metaphor for film-making. Locke's construction, we are told, is the largest of its kind in Europe ("excluding military and nuclear") and the same qualified horizon-breaking could be said of the film's epic minimalism.

It's a thriller that magpies from opposite genres, Marion and Geoff in a Hitchcockian key, and the mix is oddly purifying. My other favourite film of the half-year, Asghar Farhadi's The Past, did the reverse. Like A Separation, Farhadi's masterly breakthrough, The Past is an existential family drama as emotional mystery, staggered with clues, motives and red herrings. It is as exhilarating as any thriller.

It is, of course, possible to get drunk on ideas and overdo it (the new Johnny Depp film Transcendence, for example, seems to have flown too near the sun). It is also possible to combine philosophical heft with visual grandeur without losing a sense of humour (The Great Beauty did this splendidly). But less, even for a thriller, can be so much more. Films like Locke, or The Past, have a misplaced modesty and, above the cacophony of capes and franchises, I want to trumpet them from the treetops.

Locke isn't perfect. There's an overbaked football analogy, and the briefest of nervy character-expositions that gild a black tulip already in bloom (we can see he's good at his job), and the final fifteen minutes are almost too subtle. But overall writer-director Steven Knight's script is a wit-lathed, plot-pared model of stillness and speed. Beckett once said: "James Joyce was a synthesiser, trying to bring in as much as he could: I am an analyser, trying to leave out as much as I can." If only more writers followed suit.

(You could start with your adjectives, you florid prick).]]>A Brief History of the Mockumentary and Six Gems You Might Not Knowtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.50091222014-03-21T17:42:56-04:002014-05-21T05:59:02-04:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/W1A, a spin-off to gentle Olympifarce Twenty Twelve. A mockumentary about the BBC made by the BBC, it's too early to say if a satire whose hunter and quarry live in the same stable is ingenious or misguided. Instead, it seems timely (or the lowest form of hack opportunism to publish an article I've had marinating for months) to look back at the mockumentary as a genre, which has evolved from the misunderstood avant-garde to the default mainstream comic register, and trumpet six underrated crackers.

In the beginning, there was Spinal Tap. Released in 1984, it is a film so perceptive, audacious and ahead-of-its-time it would have made Orwell shit in his pyjamas. Traces of that first disobedience, the deadpan masquerade of fiction as truth, are everywhere now and I want to get onto my six lesser-known treasures, but let's quickly mention: Chris Morris, grotesque-elegant hawk-in-a-fist and our sharpest satirist since Swift; Sacha Baron Cohen, protean prejudice-botherer turned Paramount-contracted expat-rebel-in-chief; the bittersweet-to-sweet dynasty of The Office, The American Office and Parks and Recreation; Simpsons heir Modern Family; the deceptively naturalistic Summer Heights High; the Blair Witch-smudged "how much is real?" wave of I'm Still Here, Exit Through The Gift Shop and Catfish...

That'll do. There was a point, a few years ago, when the mockumentary was so embedded in the mainstream that Miranda and Mrs Brown's Boys seemed briefly revolutionary, with their defamiliarised studio audience and sets that looked like sets. More recent mockumentaries have become even more self-referential. Subtle BBC Four curios The Cricklewood Greats and Brian Pern satirized exactly the sort of arts documentary you'd see on BBC Four, replete with celeb talking heads from Noel Edmonds to Phil Collins (though both seemed more in on the joke than they were on Brass Eye). Much has been made of the BBC's decision, with W1A, to wave the mirror at the BBC itself, but in some ways it's the next natural step and just a surprise it hasn't happened sooner given the success of, say, 30 Rock. Meanwhile, Channel 4 have taken a slightly different approach. Rather than frame comedy as reality (à la W1A or Brian Pern), recent hits Gogglebox and First Dates frame reality as comedy, or comedy drama, with compelling, Royle Family­-worthy results.

The best kind of mockumentary is a dazzling combination of drab parts, an admixture of pathos, humour, the accidental revelation, things left unsaid and the sand-shifts of self-awareness. Here are six belters:

The breakthrough work from Twenty Twelve and W1A creator John Morton, People Like Us follows Roy Mallard (Chris Langham), a hapless, never-seen interviewer who immerses himself in a different profession each episode. An unfortunate contemporary of The Office, it has the same dreary, turn-of-the-millennium aesthetic, but this belies a gorgeous, varied, drily subversive script: the voiceovers especially, funnier for Langham's reassuring tones, are wonderfully vague and crammed with in-jokes. There are nicely understated performances from the employees whose gentility frays the more time they spend with Mallard, a lightning rod of low-level chaos. Look out for Bill Nighy as a photographer and a young David Tennant (who's since narrated Twenty Twelve and W1A) as a struggling actor.

Jean-Luc Godard said all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun; Rob Brydon might say all you need to make a comedy is a car and a chauffeur's cap. Tragicomic storytelling at its purest, Marion and Geoff is a devastating first-person study of divorce, solitude and happiness. Brydon plays driver Keith, who's recently split from wife Marion and only allowed to see his "little smashers" Rhys and Aled under the supervision of a social worker. There's a chipper magnificence to Brydon, who's never been better: generous, cheerily jejune, freckled with melancholy and an effortless fit for Hugo Blick's magisterial script (Blick would go on to redefine the boundaries of British drama with his cerebral thriller The Shadow Line). The writing is so clever, with all the signs and symbols of an Alan Bennett Talking Head, that we see the sad truth through the sweet haze of Keith's misinterpretations. We're neither quite laughing at him or with him; we're laughing for him. Keith is a non-complainer (his name isn't even in the title) and his optimism has a quiet, heartbreaking heroism. Soon after discovering Marion's affair with colleague Geoff, he muses: "I don't feel like I've lost a wife... I've feel like I've gained a friend". Just wonderful.

Rob Brydon and Julia Davis' taboo-ablating roil around the dark interiors of the British psyche, Human Remains is formally a kind of anti-Marion and Geoff, with its focus on couples rather than the solo divorcé, but it is far, far bleaker. Each episode presents a very different, flamboyantly unappealing pair, some happier with their lot than others. It is an exact and exacting portraiture: every line is necessary - weighted with foreboding, smeared with despair, Weltschmerz-weary - and there's an involuted twist to every episode, even more satisfying when viewed a second time (this, along with the outlandish variety, anticipates recent portmanteau series Inside No. 9). Brydon and Davis are monstrously good and remarkably versatile, taking it in turns to wear the trousers and torment the other. Of a very fine bunch, 'An English Squeak' is perhaps the best, a peerless assault on the cruel, sex-etiolated otherness of the upper-middle classes.

Look Around You is Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz' note-perfect paean to those faintly terrifying seventies educational films that science teachers used to stick on when they needed a rest. All the tropes are here: Bunsen Burners; white powders; grave instructions; austere blue backgrounds; technicians stirring things, their heads always just out of shot. Both series were lovely, but the first struck a particularly brilliant turn-of-phrase, a soluble solution of earnestness ("Write that down"; "Have you observed the chalky deposit at the base of the beaker?"; "The igloo has melted... perhaps the scientist forgot to turn off a Bunsen") and absurdist jargon ("Gary Gum"; "Bakerloo Belljar" "Thanks Ants... Thants"). The script is gently heated by Nigel Lambert's honeyed patrician tones, an admirable addition to the canon of authoritative voices saying silly things (along with Michael Buerk on Pineapple Dance Studios and Tom Baker on Little Britain). A deadpan, crisply edited, nostalgia-perfused masterclass.

Brydon again. If Brydon is the Samuel Beckett of the mockumentary - the fringe existentialism, the experimental minimalism, the laughter of disquiet - Directors Commentary is his Krapp's Last Tape. As Peter de Lane, a fruity director from the old school, Brydon provides a spoof commentary for a handful of dated seventies shows (western Bonanza; period drama Flambards; some sitcoms). The self-imposed restriction of this simple conceit allows for all sorts of tragicomic freedom and, as in Nabokov's Pale Fire, the commentary becomes less about the work than a chance for de Lane to cathart his own traumas. One Flambards fight scene draws on the vicious attacks he used to receive in the playground from "some of the bigger boys... some very big boys, who I later discovered were actually teachers, who would go and change into school uniform so as not to be apprehended." An ingeniously observant, richly quotable meta-delight.

I can't bear that more people haven't seen The Comeback, a pullulating viper nest of a show and the most artfully depressing TV satire since Larry Sanders. Lisa Kudrow is just astoundingly good as Valerie Cherish, a shrill, squittering actress who had her own show in the early nineties, but hasn't had a hit since. After winning a supporting role in Room and Bored (a sitcom so dreadful it makes Gervais' When The Whistle Blows look like The Importance of Being Earnest), a reality camera crew agree to follow Valerie's comeback, but with rather less reverence than Valerie signed up for. The support characterisation is impeccable, some in Valerie's corner (husband Mark, stylist Mickey, writer Tom, co-star Juna), others less so (stepdaughter Franchesca, doc-director Jane, the appalling Paulie G). Brailled with insecurities, the carapace of Valerie's ego is scorched under the jaguar sun of showbiz, blood-orange in a white sky of humiliation, but it doesn't crack. Valerie cleaves to the idea that she is a star and always will be, and for all her strops and delusions and self-abasements, her ordeal is so beautifully written and so agonisingly performed, you root for her. Axed after one flawless series, reports emerged this week that there are plans, seven years on, for a second. YES!]]>'The Grand Budapest Hotel': Wes Anderson's Masterpiece?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.49376792014-03-11T19:00:00-04:002014-05-11T05:59:01-04:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/Paul Thomas, the disquieting yin of American art-cinema to his wistful yang, Wes' development is less a question of reinvention than maturing into his own prodigious grammar. His last two films in particular, Fantastic Mr Fox and Moonrise Kingdom, were retro, anarchic delights that coalesced boundless visual ambition with a miniaturist melancholy. But The Grand Budapest Hotel, his latest, trumps everything he's done so far.

Anderson's first 'European' film tells the story of lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) and his relationship with Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), the raffish manager of the eponymous Grand Budapest. As World War Two brews, Gustave's heady, perfumed existence is jolted by the reported death of an elderly millionairess, one of his many "old, blonde mistresses". Accompanied by protégé Zero, he hotfoots it across the continent to pay his respects, finds out she's left him a priceless artwork called Boy with Apple, then hotfoots it back with the painting under his arm and her furious family on his tail.

By turns rollicking caper, surrogate-father-and-son study and chaos-on-the-horizon tone poem, it is also a film about the retelling and dissimulation of stories, nested under various authorial layers. A girl visits the statue of an unnamed Author and opens a copy of his novel, The Grand Budapest Hotel. In her head, the middle-aged Author (Tom Wilkinson) introduces the plot; his younger self (Jude Law) takes over, before he bumps into the elderly Zero (F. Murray Abraham) and the narrative resumes first-hand - all in the first fifteen minutes.

Indeed, though books, plays, letters, diaries and literary devices flutter throughout Anderson's work, this is his most writerly film and the script is his funniest so far - precise, peppery, swift, mischievous, elegant, slightly camp and toughened by unprecedented bolts of bad language. It is the sort of script actors must rejoice in and Ralph Fiennes is a fey, feathery, Laurence Olivier-ghosted delight. He splashes about in the lines, strutting and soaking in the steam. He anneals the film's wit, heating it with his nimble diction, then cooling it slowly with a deadpan-behind-the-eyes mystique. He strops the edges of Fiennes the Shakespearean actor on a whetstone of comic eloquence and the result is quite wonderful. His M. Gustave is a showman, a survivor, extrovertly unknowable, progressively old-fashioned; he is a quintessentially Wes Anderson creation, but the ventriloquy is so deft he becomes much more. I wonder how autobiographical he is - the microscopic pedantry; the flock of dutiful eccentrics (Bill Murray et al); the dapper, secretly piss-taking politesse in the face of authority - and there is something of the hotel manager about a film director. But I've tortured enough metaphors already this paragraph, so let's move on.

The film's look, as ever with Anderson, is beautifully fussed and there are satisfying echoes of earlier works (train journeys, bunk beds, severed limbs, periscopic zooms, silhouettes scampering from left to right). But the pink picaresque haze darkens as the plot progresses and the poignancy of the end, not to ruin anything, is intensified by the sudden Inception-esque withdrawal from each layer of story. Loneliness and nostalgia metastasise through the hotel and through the film, a mix of the high-whimsical, central-European nostalgia of Bohumil Hrabal's I Served The King of England and the drifting, dreamlike loneliness of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. Certain shots, like the cavernous empty dining room, reinforce what strange, unnatural places hotels can be, cathedrals of sadness, crucibles of solitude ashen with escapist stasis. More than anything, M. Gustave's bedroom reveals an awful lot about the soul under the scented uniform.

In my typical hacky way, I once thought of Wes Anderson as the Belle and Sebastian of cinema, in that the quirky, cosy, crisp conveyance often covers up something a bit darker: the loneliness of the playground, the melodrama of puberty, the wry hyper-maturity of the outcast. But with The Grand Budapest Hotel, he's cultured his eye for serious nothings into something more devastating: the monstrous shards of war, the limits of art, the insidiousness of grief. For all its neat geometry, there is a jagged tragicomic potency to this film, which quietly celebrates writers (in a script itself a cause for celebration) against a backcloth slashed with political upheaval. As The Master did for Paul Thomas Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel represents a war-shadowed, surrogacy-swathed, nostalgia-hued high for a contemporary American great who, thrillingly for us, just seems to be hitting his stride.]]>Liam Williams: The Philip Larkin of British Comedytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.46113032014-01-16T14:41:48-05:002014-03-18T05:59:01-04:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

Bookworms will find a bed of crimson literary joy in this show, which essentially tells Williams' life story from Yorkshire to Camden and back again whenever he runs out of funds. Lawrence, Eliot, Salinger, Kerouac and McEwan are all name-checked. A rather fun 'pamphlet', which comes free with the show and almost deserves an article of its own, has fingerprints of e.e.cummings, all uncapitalised jigsaw-verse and dizzying thought-swirls.

But it is Philip Larkin whose influence looms darkest: the wit-lashed Northern nihilism; the coupling of the lyrical and the profane; the resentment of parents; the loathing for dead-end jobs; the coarse sexual self-pity. Compare, for instance, Williams' "She's probably got some lover that / Fucks her in her mortgaged flat / And picks her post up off the mat / In afternoons" with Larkin's 'High Windows'.

There are notes of other comedians here as well. There's Daniel Kitson in the dexterous mystique. There's Tim Key in the mood-music and faux-serious poetry recitals. There's a bit of Steve Coogan, too: Williams' self-interview at the start, like Alan Partridge's pre-recorded chat with himself in the masterful Mid Morning Matters, is both a reminder to the audience of his recent critical acclaim and a mock-cocky subversion of it. Williams oscillates between struggling artist and conscious caricature, now he's got universal broadsheet approval, a Foster's nom and a girlfriend, but one senses he will never be the shit in the shuttered chateau.

Like Stewart Lee, he smuggles in wry social commentary amongst the lyrical dandelions: his absurdist extrapolation of Time Out quirky date ideas is particularly astute, though perhaps the most conventional of his 'bits' (and the most accessible segment for a ten-minute slot on the likes of Comedy Roadshow. No bad thing at all). He also - like, say, Bo Burnham - satirises the studied whimsy of less original comedians (Venn diagrams!) from the safety zone of an artsy persona.

Williams gets away with all this pimple-scratching for two main reasons. Firstly, he wears the erudition lightly, almost reluctantly, and cauterises the undergraduate showmanship with a hot spike of self-awareness. Secondly, and more importantly, he is blessed with his own scorching idiolect, the sort of burning eloquence that you really don't see in comedy that often (Daniel Kitson excepted). It is so effortless, so drenched in poeticism it makes you wonder why you even bother to speak or write yourself (I've done my best here, but what's the bloody point).

Stopper 'Mongst The Wheat, his Yorkshire semi-pastiche of The Catcher in the Rye, has the rhythm of high literature, but the images are artfully artless ("the snowflakes fell to rest, fucking exhausted from their fall"; "the blanket of snow was like a blanket of snow"). Like the best Flight of the Conchords songs, the parody is so close to the style it mimics that it's almost too 'good' to be funny. Later, the depiction of grim schooldays is worryingly close in timbre to the first hundred, less intentionally ironic pages of Morrissey's (still wonderful) Autobiography.

The writing is remarkable enough, but Williams' delivery is something else. His movement and diction shimmer with the class and certainty of a seasoned character actor, a Jonathan Pryce or a Gabriel Byrne (this also comes through in his work with excellent sketch troupe Sheeps). His voice has a bracken-smoked bonfire rasp and luxuriates in the staccato cadences ("old Yorkshire git"; "he scowled and called me a c*nt"). He is a genuine writer-performer and, despite (or indeed because of) the allusions, a genuine original.

Williams is botanising the asphalt of observational comedy, ensanguining the sky of stand-up. This first set covers a hell of a lot: sex, loneliness, money, class, education, family, the past, the unfenced existence of the comic-as-artist, the arrogant eternity of death. If he is this perceptive and ambitious at twenty-five, God knows how good he'll be in his thirties and forties. Is Williams, as The Guardian apparently suggest, the voice of his generation? I bloody hope so.]]>Alexander Payne's Nebraska: The Manhattan of the Midwesttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.44665382013-12-18T14:27:10-05:002014-02-17T05:59:01-05:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

Alexander Payne (along with Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson and Todd Haynes) is one of the few American directors still able to make sophisticated, distinctive, independent-minded films. Payne harks back to a more intelligent, artistically rigorous Hollywood, the New Hollywood of Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. He is the F. Scott Fitzgerald of middle-aged stasis in middle-class Americana, a classy, wise, endlessly sympathetic chronicler of modern agonies.

His breakthrough film, Election (1999), is a stylish, searingly funny school-as-politics allegory, with all sorts of symbolic currents of male sexual longing. About Schmidt (2002) is a patient, melancholy deconstruction of old age, led by an intriguingly reserved Jack Nicholson. Sideways (2004) is a sparkling wine of a film, an existential meander amongst the vineyards of friendship, marriage, casual sex and the tensions between the three. Payne's short '14e arrondissement', the final vignette in the variable anthology film Paris, je t'aime (2006), is possibly his most impressive achievement so far, a genuinely beautiful seven-minute hymn to happiness, narrated in halting French by an American postwoman on her first European holiday. Hopes were almost unfairly high for the next feature and if Sideways was Payne's Pulp Fiction (both won screenplay Oscars), The Descendants (2011) was his Jackie Brown, an intelligent, restrained, ever so slightly underwhelming follow-up to an acknowledged masterpiece.

However, Payne's latest film, Nebraska, is his Manhattan. A black-and-white auteur-paean to a hometown, with a lovely low-wattage humour and violin-starched lyricism, it is Payne's most personal, offbeat work so far. Like Sideways, it revolves around a quietly epiphanous road trip. Senior citizen Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) receives a letter telling him he's won a million dollars. Instantly dismissed as a scam by his family, Woody insists on travelling from Montana to Nebraska to collect his winnings. His affable son David (Will Forte) eventually agrees to drive him, sensing a chance to spend time together and to see Hawthorne, where his father grew up.

Call me a Cervantes prick and I know I refer to it in almost every piece I write, but there are hues of Don Quixote here: the futile quest, the stubborn fantasist, the companion who knows it's not real but hasn't got anything better to do, the piss-taking locals, the bruises and scratches. Like the Don, you also wonder whether Woody really believes the letter is genuine and Bruce Dern, a seasoned 77-year-old character actor, plays this ambiguity beautifully. Evasive, unsmiling and absent-minded (sometimes conveniently so), Woody is desperate to cause some sort of ripple in the ocean of life, though he'd never admit it. A retired mechanic who's lost his driving licence, he is increasingly impotent, his mind a delusion-cloud of old age concussed with regrets. But it is moonlit with hope: the trip invigorates him, he endures blow after blow and his reason for wanting the money, not revealed until the end, is disarmingly moving.

There is excellent support from June Squibb as Woody's no-nonsense, potty-mouthed wife Kate and Bob Odenkirk as newsreader son Ross, but Will Forte as the other son David is the revelation. It is such a joy when comic actors play serious parts (Adam Sandler's turn in Punch Drunk Love is perhaps the apogee, and I'm chomping at the bit for Foxcatcher, starring Steve Carell as a grey-haired murderer). Here, Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock alumnus Forte is an unaffected delight. He is sincere, kind, open-minded, understated, patient and the moral heartbeat of the film. Forte's youthful features also conceal a reservoir of sadness: abandoned by his obese girlfriend and dissatisfied in his job selling speakers, the trip is as important and meditative for David as it is for his father.

Doing the rounds in Hawthorne, word spreads of Woody's imminent 'fortune'. This brings out the worst in his old neighbours, especially his former business partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), whose oily, velvet-larynxed menace is straight out of the Coen Brothers. Indeed, thanks to Bob Nelson's less-is-more script, the whole film is pervaded with a laconic, peculiarly American machismo, crofted by envy and abrased by alcohol. One tableau - eight men watching sport on television in sprawling, booze-stultified silence; a stop-start conversation about what car so-and-so drives; more silence - is both very funny and deeply depressing.

If Manhattan ironises art-gallery peacocking and urban over-thinking, Nebraska is rooted in another, more ordinary America: the harrowed reticence, the middle-of-nowhere tedium, the engrained anti-ambition, the creeping death-behind-the-eyes. Car imagery, appropriately for a film heavy with inertia, courses throughout the film: Will's fat, obnoxious cousins taunt him for taking two days to drive from Montana to Hawthorne; Woody tells a younger mechanic he's using the wrong wrench; Ed is accused of stealing Woody's air compressor; Kate refuses to let her son Ross drive. With cars the only grammar the locals understand, the unusually sensitive David retorts in their own language and the final shot is a gently virtuosic two-fingers to Hawthorne's jackals.

What an interesting film this is, a triumphant coming-of-old-age fable about family, memory and success, fimbriated with small-town pettiness. It's been a vintage year for quirky lost souls in US cinema (Noah Baumbach's charming Frances Ha; the Coens' beguiling Inside Llewyn Davis), but Nebraska, a wry mirror to a less glamorous, less immediately cinematic swathe of American society, is a particular triumph. Jean Renoir once said that "the only things that matter are the ones we remember". Though Woody remembers less and less as he gets older, and though everyone in the film (as in life) remembers things differently, David's act of kindness ensures that his father's final memories chime as much as possible with his wildest dreams.]]>Ricky Gervais and 'Derek': A Defencetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.42449792013-11-10T19:00:00-05:002014-01-23T18:58:21-05:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

The Office is one of the great artistic works of the 21st Century. It was the Waiting for Godot of television comedy, a radical reinvention of the genre that will probably never be equalled. Weighted with a deadpan poeticism somewhere between Christopher Guest and Kafka, it is a staggeringly textured study of class, ennui, self-delusion, laughter, companionship, solitude and the importance of work. Its anti-hero, David Brent, joins Messrs Partridge, Fawlty and Mainwaring in the canon of misunderstood, quixotic, middle-English dreamers. It is the sort of show that makes you proud to be British.

Extras, Gervais and co-writer Stephen Merchant's follow-up, was a searing, complicated fable about fame, ambition and loyalty, and the sourest, sharpest satire of show-business since The Larry Sanders Show. (The best since Extras, for what it's worth, is Lisa Kudrow's The Comeback - it is bleakly magnificent and, like Human Remains, the sort of one-series wonder that commands an almost Masonic solidarity amongst its followers).

Those who've been on a film or TV set may well have wondered what a lonely, Sisyphean existence the extra must lead: seen but not heard, they stand around, make hours of small talk with strangers, are herded back and forth like cattle, and can only eat once everybody else has. The pronounced, shifting hierarchy of the film set is a lovely metaphor for the hierarchy of life, and Andy Millman's ascent is a cautionary one. Everyone will have their favourite cameos (David Bowie; Ian McKellen; Daniel Radcliffe; Ronnie Corbett), but the Les Dennis episode is the tragicomic apogee of Extras and, outside of The Office, the finest half hour of Gervais' career to date.

Life's Too Short, Gervais and Merchant's much-anticipated third TV collaboration after a dabble in film, is the closest they've had to a dud. Though a nice conceit gamely played by Warwick Davis, it is difficult to see Life's Too Short as more than a Frankenstein's monster of Gervais' previous work: Warwick's speech patterns and exasperated looks to camera are almost identical to Brent's; the potted-career-satire of the celebrity cameo has become a bit paint-by-numbers (though Liam Neeson was wonderfully dour); Warwick's assistant and accountant are basically Maggie and Darren Lamb, minus the pathos; even Barry, Les and Cheggers (all revelations in Extras) are reappropriated and dumbed down. It feels altogether less sophisticated, and the subtle visual gags (like Warwick throwing his trousers against a background loo window while his assistant talks to an estate agent) are to be cherished amongst the funny-at-first, repetitious pratfalling (like Warwick falling out of his car for the tenth time). Sprinkle in private jokes nicked straight from the podcasts and the co-creators' cameos as themselves (which bottle the faux-mean-spiritedness of Gervais' public persona), and the result is a moveable feast gone stale and cold. This is, very much, their difficult third album.

Derek, which comes out on DVD this week, is perhaps the bravest move of Gervais' career so far. Chris Rock once said that it takes serious balls to do comedy on stage as subtle as Gervais' early stand-up: it takes even more balls to make a sitcom as sincere as Derek. It is an anti-Life's Too Short, a gentle chamber piece that sheds his usual chrysalis of irony. The acrid moral wasteland of showbiz has been replaced by the cosy, death-around-the-corner altruism of an old people's home, and Derek himself is Gervais' most generous character to date - an affectionate, deceptively acute marvel: his performance takes a bit of getting used to and some argue the part should have been given to a 'better actor' (a Peter Capaldi, for instance), but I disagree: it is a perplexing performance that suits a profoundly personal show (half of Gervais' family work in care) and it's revealing that Gervais wrote this, his most understated work, on his own as I always assumed Merchant was the one who reined him in.

The characterisation is complex, if muted. Derek's fellow carer Hannah (an enchanting Kerry Godliman) is the warm, grounded Tim figure. Derek adores her, as she does him, but Gervais resists the fairytale temptation to bring them together. Instead, she has a relationship with Tom (Brett Goldstein), who initially, intriguingly, is mean to Derek and comes across as a bit of a prick, but once they're together and she keeps forgetting date nights, their romance is left (deliberately?) underdeveloped. Derek's other friends are no-nonsense, handyman-of-the-people Dougie (a surprisingly convincing Karl Pilkington) and crass perv Kev (Gervaisian muse David Earl), with whom Derek channels the same, slightly wearisome "which would you rather" badinage that Gervais disciples will have heard countless times on Extras or podcasts. We must also remember the residents, a genteel community of non-complainers living in a shadow-mesh of each other's memories. Derek is a lovely character, but I did find the last episode's talking-heads montage, in which they bathe Derek with praise and Dougie wishes he could come back as him in another life, a bit too hagiographic. More interesting is the self-loathing Kev reveals in his talking-head and the qualified optimism of the Doc Brown character's rap.

Derek is genuinely life-affirming. How many sitcoms capture the quiet, gradual, dignified, terrifying, wistful, relief-flecked prospect of death? Of recent comedies, only Jo Brand's masterful Getting On comes close. The photo montages of the elderly residents looking back on their lives are almost unbearably moving. In the pre-series pilot broadcast in April last year, there is an awful moment of dramatic irony, heightened by the mockumentary format, when Derek comes back from a trip into town with lottery tickets for a favourite resident, who has died while he's been out. What follows - through-the-door glimpses of Derek putting her hand on his head; the "kindness is magic" recollection; Derek's unguarded, tear-blotched candour - is superlative, achingly sad television. There's something very affecting about a crying Ricky Gervais (a rare exception is the overwrought scene in his film The Invention of Lying at his mother's bedside, which has no build and comes rather out of nowhere). The pitiful scene in The Office where Brent begs Neil not to make him redundant and Andy Millman's virtuoso rant about fame in the Celebrity Big Brother house are glorious syntheses of Gervais the actor and Gervais the writer. But in Derek, it's even more touching. The final shot of the series, reminiscent of The Shawshank Redemption's, is a rapturous, knock-the-wind-out-of-you delight, though surely former XFM DJ Gervais could have picked a song other than Coldplay's Fix You (released 2005) to go over the top of it.

Good old Ricky Gervais. He can come across as a bit of a pompous arse - on chat shows; at American awards ceremonies; baiting Christians on Twitter - but he is the closest we have to a comedic poet laureate and Derek, far from mocking disability, is so sensitively written and imbued with such goodness that it could be shown in schools.

An interviewer once put it to Joseph Heller that, since Catch-22, he hadn't written anything nearly as good. Heller replied: "No, but neither has anyone else." The same could be said of Gervais and The Office (even if Gervais implies so himself - he tweeted this exchange as "perfect"), and he won't better it. But with Derek he has plumbed unprecedented emotional depths and reminded audiences how sweet, understated and thoughtful he can be. Please watch Derek as soon as possible.]]>Joanna Hogg's 'Exhibition': Architecture, Sex and Anxietytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.41435812013-10-22T18:39:51-04:002014-01-23T18:58:21-05:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

Of this current golden age of female British directors (Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard, Lynne Ramsay, Lucy Walker and Sophie Fiennes, to name a few), Joanna Hogg is the Terrence Malick, the understated maverick and perhaps the most intriguing of the lot. A former photographer and apprentice to Derek Jarman, she is a pointillist of human motive: every shot is composed with the rigour of an old master, packed with painterly juxtapositions, quilted with signs and symbols.

A tonal cross between Noel Coward and Michael Haneke, her debut film Unrelated was a startling examination of childlessness, upper-middle class ennui and the smugness of families, with Tom Hiddleston at his most youthfully beguiling. Her second, Archipelago, tempered the lyricism of the Tresco landscape with a darker feel for claustrophobia, stasis and silence. Both works revolved around family holidays (in Tuscany and the Scilly Isles respectively), but Exhibition, her latest offering which premiered at the London Film Festival on Saturday, is her first film to be set in a city. It is comfortably her strangest so far.

The film deconstructs the architecture of the marriage between performance artist D (played by Viv Albertine, former guitarist of The Slits) and architect H (conceptual artist Liam Gillick) through the decision to sell their beloved London home, a modernist labyrinth that shimmers with symbolism. It is an extension of their relationship, a House of Dorian Gray where the couple's personalities and moods percolate into its colour schemes (red for her; blue for him) and even their names have a coffee-table minimalism. Hogg's usual pastoral soundscape of crickets and birdsong gives way to traffic, alarms, sirens, shouting, and the thunder of the home's own sliding doors.

The house is their only child. During a dinner party at theirs, a local couple witter on about their children, and the wife even gets up to check through the window that her son is doing his homework; later, when the neighbours return the favour at theirs, D looks back at her own house with the same maternal vigilance in exactly the same pose. D and H become increasingly protective of their home in the face of intruders: an argument with a builder over their residential parking space is about more than a parking space (as if their house weren't hermetic enough, H suggests erecting a big gate saying "Fuck Off!" to keep people out). Towards the end, in one of the film's most moving images, the couple hold hands in silent anguish over the dining-room table as the estate agents show around a busybody surveyor. Hogg is the absolute doyenne of on-screen reactions to off-screen turbulence: the terrible row between Tom Hiddleston and his father in Unrelated is shown from the perspective of the reluctant listeners, just as the mother's worst argument with her husband in Archipelago occurs off-screen.

However, the house is also the forbidding parent, who paralyses the couple with a deleterious, womb-like cosiness: the recurrence of the spiral staircase, especially the moment where H chases D up the stairs, is a sad reminder of the children that will never do the same ("it's not a family home", their neighbour sniffs). D, in particular, demonstrates a pulsing emotional attachment to objects. There is an awful visual rhyme between the film's opening shot, in which D hugs the window seat (she later hugs a garden rock in the same way), and that grim, passive bedroom scene where she faces the wall and her husband tries to undress her.

This brings us to the bedroom scenes, which are as depressingly intense as any I've seen on film and abetted by actors Albertine and Gillick, whose performances are unstudied marvels. She is unsmiling, vinegary and shares nothing: for a performance artist, it is telling how often her face is turned away from the camera (the back of her head in her study; facing walls; looking out windows; face down in the bed or the swimming pool). He is cerebral, sexually parched and has a (nicely unelaborated) history of erratic behaviour. A bedtime reading of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf (a deliciously throwaway high-literary reference) both infantilises D and ushers in a fellow study of middle-aged, self-reflexive outsiderdom. In the first sex scene, the contortions of the duvet and the sprawling, not-tonight languor of the limbs underneath have the voyeuristic anti-eroticism of a Lucian Freud . The lethargic afternoon session mentioned above, which starts with H drawing the curtains and D just sort of lying there, brings to mind that peerless description of unrequited male lust in 'The Wasteland':

Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And make a welcome of indifference.

After rather too much indifference to his rubs and pecks, H stops exploring and admits defeat with balls as blue as the wallpaper. But her libido is dormant, or misplaced, rather than burnt out. She records memories of erotic dreams into a dictaphone, at first in private, later with H in bed next to her. More sadly, after H has nodded off one night, she puts on split knickers and high heels, smothers herself in oil and masturbates. Their marriage, for most of the film, is emotionally and sexually occluded, as rusty and tepid as their dodgy boiler. Even though they live and work in the same house, they spend a lot of time talking over the telephone (distant phone calls is another Hoggian motif, as with Anna's desperate hunts for Tuscan reception in Unrelated and the mother's tetchy chats with her husband in Archipelago, though D feels no closer to her husband than these two). But once D is offered an artistic lifeline by a woman called Susan, and once she finally allows him to give her sympathetic creative advice, the dam breaks and the brook of intellectual intimacy runs through it.

The title Exhibition, another one-word wonder and as with the best titles, invites multiple interpretations. It refers, most clearly, to the gallery space D is offered towards the end of the film, a cathartic moment (again over the phone) and possibly the first time we see her smile. But it also calls to mind various forms of exhibitionism and, although H is physically exposed (in her work; in the pool; in the bedroom), she holds an awful lot back. Ironically, Exhibition is more internal than Hogg's previous work and embraces a sort of cinematic style indirect libre, where one can't quite tell whether certain scenes are memories or fantasies: a flashback to H and D's wedding night (those stairs again); a flame-blowing tuba-player in Trafalgar Square; a Fellini-esque sequence where H and D interview each other on stage, watched from the stalls by a second D (this became particularly meta when our screening was followed by an actual Q&A with Hogg and Albertine!) Some may find this frustrating, but it takes Hogg's work into ever more ambitious planes, where she fabulates even the more everyday sequences with the surrealist symmetries, the woozy aestheticism and the synchronic fire of a dream.

At the Q&A after our screening, Hogg was asked whether she felt British and she said not really, as she's always felt like a bit of an outsider and doesn't really know what British means. This makes sense and, though I started by lazily lumping her in with that sparkling roll-call of compatriots and though most of her characters come from that most stereotyped of British classes, Hogg is probably our least British director. It is reductive and fruitless to draw too many parallels between an artist's life and their work, but she would seem to decant her own social otherness into all her films: her cinematic sensibilities belong, if anywhere, to a sort of pan-European arthouse, closer to, say, Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan than anyone from these fair isles. Having said all that, I do hope Hogg continues to collaborate with Tom Hiddleston, who has a cameo as a slick estate agent in Exhibition, as they could become the Scorsese and De Niro of British arthouse for years to come (intriguingly, Hogg gives Scorsese 'special thanks' in the end credits).

Discussing the film afterwards with my lovely friend (and fellow Joanna Hogg disciple) Checky, we agreed that, of Hogg's three films, this is the one we'd least rush to see again. This is not a criticism: it is starker, slower, less linear, more oneiric than her previous work, but no less fascinating or satisfying. It is a wonderful, bewitching piece that cuts through the architectonics of a long-term relationship like the replica house-cake H carves up at their leaving party. It has the soul of a Turner Prize-winning film installation, the visual strictness of a Dutch painting, the psychological vagaries of a modernist novel and, somehow amongst all that, a wry humour. Regardless of how British she is, Hogg is an artist to be cherished and Exhibition is her most exciting film so far.]]>'The Larry Sanders Show': The 'Breaking Bad' of Sitcomstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.40136932013-09-30T19:00:00-04:002013-11-30T05:12:02-05:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

The week that Breaking Bad finishes, it seems fitting (or the lowest form of hack opportunism to publish an article I've had marinating for months) to reappraise a show as revolutionary, allegorical and morally nebulous in a different genre. The Larry Sanders Show, which ran on HBO for six series from 1992 to 1998, is a fictional chatshow-within-a-show that interlaces behind-the-scenes chaos with snippets of the chatshow itself. It is, in my opinion, the Great American Sitcom, a sharp, dark, complicated exploration of quintessentially American ambition, an infinite hall of cracked mirrors, a recursion between the chatshow and the sitcom as half-evolving, half-monolithic forms.

But the glamorous names were only ever incidental jolts of showbiz authenticity. This is really a conventional workplace comedy irrigated with subversively 'difficult' characterisation. Even compared to Seinfeld, a Clinton-era contemporary of Larry Sanders whose George Costanza plumbed new depths of misanthropy-for-laughs, it is remarkably acrid for a mainstream show, let alone a comedy. Peopled with neurotics, back-stabbers and wannabes, painted in charmless, bitter hues, it is the diametric opposite of the flawed-but-cosy ensembles of Parks and Recreation and Modern Family, today's US sitcoms par excellence.

Also, there is always a risk with shows-about-shows that they are too full of in-jokes or First World Problems for audiences to care about their characters ("Oh no! The poor millionaire chatshow host in his big lonely house!") The reason it works here is the writing - so scabrously, relentlessly brilliant - and its focus on the bromantic triumvirate of host Larry, producer Artie and Larry's 'sidekick' Hank.

Larry (Garry Shandling) is a selfish, cowardly, paranoid, philandering narcissist: he hits on the guests, makes his conquests watch the show in bed with him (in the case of Sharon Stone he can only get an erection once he can hear the audience laugh at his jokes), is obsessed his arse is too fat, needs constant reassurance that he's funny, hates when other comics do impressions of him, bullies Hank, overworks his assistant Beverly and makes Artie do his dirty work for him. But he is redeemed by his reluctance to cow-tow to the network suits (he mocks the Garden Weasel he is made to advertise; his response to constructive criticism from a fresh-faced executive is to perform a sketch with a young Haley Joel Osment as a network employee), by his loyalty to his staff, and by the glimpses of his vulnerability: the awful row he has with his wife Jeannie at a party in view of his colleagues, the tearful TV interview in which he likens Hank to the brother he never had, his all-smiles-for-the-camera fear of being usurped by someone younger.

Artie (played by Rip Torn, who was wheelchair-bound Patches O'Houlihan in Dodgeball) is Larry's old-school, plant-loving, bruisingly eloquent producer: charismatic, hard-drinking and increasingly disdainful of the industry, he is exceptional at his job, a Winston Wolfe-type firefighter who helps extinguish Larry's scandals (as when Larry is caught on CCTV knocking a mother into a supermarket magazine rack, or accused of impregnating a woman from Montana). Indeed, so protective of Larry is he that, on a romantic trip to Italy with Angie Dickinson, Artie turns down sex to watch a dubbed best-of compilation he's already seen (a strangely masturbatory link to Larry's own bedtime habits).

Hank (Jeffrey Tambor) is perhaps the most compelling of the three, and one of the most pitiful creations in TV history (Ricky Gervais has said Hank was a strong influence on David Brent). A former cruise ship entertainer, his monstrous ego is perforated with childlike insecurities, a hunger for endorsements (like the notorious Hankerciser workout machine) and a ferocious temper. But one cannot help but feel sorry for him. His (televised) marriage to a much younger woman is a disaster, he is the failsafe butt of every joke both on and off the air, and he is swimming against the tide of the zeitgeist (his attempt to make small talk with the Wu Tang Clan is particularly emblematic). He's also extremely loyal to Larry, bails him out of numerous on-air pickles, and is very sweet when Larry's estranged dad comes to visit (it also reveals something of Hank's rather sad upbringing).

There is a rich ensemble of supporting characters (Phil the writer; Larry's assistant Beverly; Hank's assistants Darlene and Brian; Paula the booker), who all fit into a regimented hierarchy. When one lowly character asks Larry if he wants to hang out that weekend, Larry can't: "I'm playing with my peers", he sneers.

Some of the comic writing is just gorgeous, ranging from everyday silliness (like Larry caught putting on his shoes before pulling up his trousers) to the most palatable of TV in-jokes (as when Jerry Seinfeld finds Hank asleep on the sofa on the Seinfeld set). It operates on various planes of irony, laughing both at and with the snappy, bully-boy dialogue of a macho world. The quality of Larry's show-opening monologues is predicated on earlier plot factors (like Phil's levels of concentration or his reluctance to use other people's jokes) and the writers nail those shitty, disposable chatshow sketches, all broad costumes and warm-from-the-oven topical references. There are also those wonderful moments, during the advert breaks or musical performances, where Larry and his guests let their guard down mid-show (of a particularly rough-and-ready Beck, Larry whispers that "it sounds like he's making it up as he goes along".)

No duds spring to mind, but the finest episodes are cautionary Hollywood tales, Aesop's Fables of fame. The best of the lot (and Garry Shandling's own personal favourite) is 'Hank's Time In The Sun', where Hank (for so long the bridesmaid) gets his chance to host the show in Larry's absence. His triumphant first night goes to his head, he loses his clumsy charm, and the second night is a disaster. Another pitch-perfect juxtaposition of success and failure is when Jeremy Piven's character is sacked on Larry's birthday: he refuses to go quietly.

If the show has a flaw, it could be seen as a bit phallocentric (an accusation that's also been leveled at Breaking Bad). But the obstacles the female characters like Paula and Beverly face, including professional glass ceilings and misogynistic idiots like Phil, seem to satirise machismo rather than perpetuate it; it, therefore, seems able to have its cake and eat it. The show was a crucible for writer-producer Judd Apatow, who has since blossomed (though possibly mellowed) into the defining mainstream comic voice of noughties American cinema and there are echoes of the same preoccupations in his films (especially friendship between men, but also their struggle to relate to women).

It is rare for a comedy to be as sad and existential as the most textured drama and one of the show's most impressive virtues is the overarching coherence, the darkening transience of Larry's own time in the sun. From the moment Jon Stewart first turns up at the production office in his leather jacket, there is a sense of inevitability that is weirdly, genuinely tragic, and a perversely persuasive link is made between being on television and being alive. The hour-long final episode is an elegiac masterpiece, crammed with tragicomic nuances: Jim Carrey's virtuoso guest spot, beautifully undercut when he admits during the ads that he's only doing the farewell show because of the guaranteed ratings and he has a new film to promote; Artie's tears, which he tries to hide from the camera; the lump-in-the-throat silence during Larry's goodbye monologue; and the final, prickly chat between Larry, Artie and Hank in the stalls after the final show.

The Larry Sanders Show is a postmodern tragicomedy-of-bad-manners, as ahead-of-its-time and as monumental to the American comic landscape as Chris Morris is to ours. It has influenced (among so many others) Alan Partridge, The Office, Extras, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Episodes, Entourage and 30 Rock. Pablo Neruda once said that a man who has never read the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar is like a man who has never tasted peaches. If you've never seen The Larry Sanders Show, you have never tasted grapefruit - a sour, acquired taste, but uniquely refreshing. So get your spoon out and have some grapefruit comedy.

(I'm not sure what that makes Breaking Bad. A cross between a blood orange and a pomegranate?)]]>'Southcliffe': The 'Hamlet' Of British Televisiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.37822292013-08-20T03:58:40-04:002013-10-19T05:12:01-04:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

It is rare to watch a TV show in 2013 and realise, within about 15 minutes, that it might be one of the best British dramas of all time. But Channel 4's Southcliffe, which finished on Sunday, is something really rather special. Exploring the dynamics of a fictional English town affected by a Hungerford-type shooting, it is a magisterial one-off and a taut, haunting extrapolation of small-town taunting. With an elliptical back-and-forth structure and a provincial, pylon-buzzing lyricism, this is timelessly classy, state-of-the-nation television-as-literature, an arthouse film masquerading in the Downton Abbey, Sunday-at-nine slot.

It evens stands comparison with modern American classics, despite the British industry's relatively Lilliputian budgets. If haute US drama like The Wire and Mad Men - rich, sprawling epics stuffed with characters, story arcs and the odd dud chapter - is the equivalent of the nineteenth-century novel, Southcliffe is a precision-engineered short-story, in the spirit of J. D. Salinger's 'A Perfect Day For Bananafish', and all the more devastating for its brevity. The Sopranos had eighty-six episodes; Southcliffe has four. But, my god, does it pack a lot in.

It is hardly surprising, given its pedigree. It is made by Warp, the visionary production company behind This Is England, with whose compassionate dissection of parochial machismo Southcliffe rhymes. It pairs Sean Durkin, the 31-year-old director behind the disquietingly assured Martha Marcy May Marlene, with Tony Grisoni, who co-scripted the Yorkshire noir Red Riding trilogy. Grisoni assembles Southcliffe's structure with the care and authority of a Swiss watchmaker, albeit one who likes playing with the hands, while Durkin (who is Canadian but grew up in the UK) envelops the story with a subtle sense of dread, return-to-childhood otherness and a visual-moral haze.

Durkin also draws performances that hum with the galvanic allure of the pylons. The formidable Sean Harris plays gunman Stephen Morton, a laconic military fantasist who lives with his elderly mother (as did Hungerford perpetrator Michael Ryan). Stephen comes across, at first, as a slightly unnerving oddball rather than dangerous (weirdly his West Country, wannabe-soldier gawkiness reminded me of Gareth from The Office), before a beating-in-the-rain transforms him into an impassive angel of death, a black-clad, broad-shouldered force of anti-nature. It is impossible to justify what Stephen does, obviously, but the hand he's been dealt in life is so pitiful, the mud-and-piss-soaked straw that breaks the camel's back so severe, and the writing, acting and direction of his backstory so humane, that one can sort of understand what drove him to it. Sort of.

After the first couple of episodes, the dramatic focus shifts to Rory Kinnear's David Whitehead, a London-based BBC journalist sent back to report on a hometown of which he has less than fond memories (like Thomas Turgoose's Shaun in This Is England, David was bullied as a child over the death of his father). A nervy, modest presence whose face is simultaneously old and boyish, Kinnear was critically acclaimed for his Hamlet at the National Theatre three years ago and there is an element of Hamlet to David: the dead dad; the bitterness; the overthinking reluctance to return to a "rotten state". David's grand soliloquy, a pub diatribe against the mean-spiritedness of the town, isn't confided to a theatre audience, but recorded on a phone, posted on YouTube and fated (along with the memory of his dad) to haunt him forever.

The loved ones of the victims are played by a National Portrait Gallery of character actors, including Skins alumnus Joe Dempsie as a squaddie-on-leave, Boardwalk Empire's Anatol Yusef as a selfish, soul-loving philanderer, Shirley Henderson as a gentle careworker reduced to a whimpering, soliciting spectre, and the peerless Eddie Marsan. I won't give too much away, but the build-up to each shooting is quietly, inescapably gut-wrenching, and there is a particularly desperate montage at the end of the second episode involving a ringing phone. The violence, which mostly occurs off-screen, is composed, brusque and shockingly understated.

Music only plays when characters actively listen to it, which intensifies the silences, but it also becomes a distillate of a character's mood and a form of emotional punctuation (symbolic choices include Otis Redding, John Martyn, Oasis and even the Shipping Forecast). The ultimate catharsis comes during an acoustic set at the annual All Souls concert, a supremely restrained, ambiguous final tableau that highlights the absence of those present the year before.

We've been very luck with mystery drama this year. Broadchurch gave mass audience TV a thoughtful, Scandinavia-infused shot in the arm; the second episode of Morse-prequel Endeavour, with its finale on the Trinity College roof, was genuinely operatic; Top of the Lake (which has also just finished) was a sublimely shot gallimaufry of Antipodean feminism, Twin Peaks scratch-the-surface surrealism and Old Testament starkness.

But Southcliffe is a class apart, genuinely monumental TV that already sits comfortably within the British canon (the only other show from this decade that sits as comfortably is the episode of Accused with a cross-dressing Sean Bean, which was as melancholy, intricate and exhilaratingly poetic as television gets). Above all else, Southcliffe is a feverishly British elegy to loss - not just the loss of a loved one, but the loss of memory, the loss of childhood, the loss of tempers, the loss of the capacity for joy, the loss of fear, the loss of reason, the loss of one's sense of self, the loss of the will to live. Questions are left tantalisingly unanswered (including the most terrifying one of all), many of the characters look into the jaws of suicide, and the very notion of community is corroded, if not actively corrosive. And yet amongst all that anguish, particularly in that subdued final scene at the concert, lie the bewildered, delicate embers of a seething hope. What a piece of work is Southcliffe.]]>'Stoner' the Literary Rediscovery of the Yeartag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.36675912013-07-28T14:57:09-04:002013-09-27T05:12:01-04:00Ed Crippshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-cripps/

I sometimes think authors are like chefs. Virtuoso willy-wavers like Updike, Bellow and Martin Amis, linguistic pyrotechnicians who pack their descriptions with incongruities and lyricism and look-at-me flights of cleverness, are brothers-in-arms to Heston Blumenthal and elBulli's Ferran Adrià, the brains behind bacon-and-egg ice cream and Rice Krispies paella.

John Williams' novel Stoner falls into this second category. It is the literary equivalent of a leg of lamb so tender, easy-to-leave-the-bone and immaculately prepared you could eat it every day for the rest of your life; it is a feast for the soul, next to which snail porridge and garlic sorbet seem almost laughably unsatisfying.

First published in 1965, its rediscovery has become one of the literary sensations of the year. Vaunted by writers as varied as Julian Barnes ("a terrific novel of echoing sadness") and Bret Easton Ellis ("one of the great unheralded 20th century American novels... almost perfect"), Stoner is currently the best-selling classic on Amazon UK, even ahead of The Great Gatsby.

It is the story of William Stoner, a farmer's son who goes to the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. After an eye-opening lecture on Shakespeare, he switches courses and spends the rest of his life there as a teacher of English Literature. His life is fairly uneventful: he marries the wrong woman; he falls out with a work colleague; he has an affair. But it is told with such compassion and patience, with such a feel for the power of unshowy language and unshowy living, that it drifts into the realms of quiet, Chekhovian greatness.

Stoner is a stoical, hard-working introvert: he is a creature of habit, a pacifist and a non-complainer, unless his academic principles are threatened. A man of many thoughts and few words, Stoner is at his most eloquent at his most prepared, though he is prone to unfinished sentences (Williams has a particularly good ear for the inarticulacy of the shy, and there is a poignant parallel between Stoner's contribution to his first literature lecture and the short speech he gives at his retirement dinner). Such a protagonist has the potential to be deathly dull, but in Williams' hands, it's one of the saddest, most nuanced character studies in the history of American literature.

The novel's secondary characterisation is just as brilliant, with Stoner's wife Edith an especially masterful creation: she's a brittle, vindictive daughter of privilege, both pitiful and quietly horrific, and a knight's move away from the unhappy women of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. She actively sets out to make her husband's life a misery, and he semi-heroically resigns himself to putting up with it.

William's colleague Hollis Lomax, with his "grotesquely misshapen" body and the "face of a matinee idol", is introduced with an intangible sense of foreboding and slowly becomes the festering lily in William's professional life. The few kindred spirits William discovers - his feverishly alive university contemporary Dave Masters; his daughter Grace; his star pupil Katherine Driscoll - are corrupted and alienated by conspiring external forces. Rare solace is found in Stoner's friend Gordon Finch, who survives the First World War to head the university's English department and is one of the very few characters who seems grateful to be alive.

I hope I haven't made it sound too depressing: it is very depressing, and yet it shudders with a triumphant, compulsive, "I can't go on, I'll go on" heroism. All life is here: the loneliness and disillusionment of childhood; the gulf between what you want and what your parents want for you; the guilt of the non-soldier; the war of ill-fitted marriage and children as its battlefield; the acceptance that some dreams will never be realised; those crucial moments where sticking to your principles makes your life permanently more difficult; the disintegration (what Anthony Powell called the 'snapping') of close, early friendship; the purpose of life as a fusion of "lust and learning"; the cries and whispers, the disappointments, the grievances, the things left unsaid. And it's all so gloriously low-key. For instance, when Stoner has an affair, there is no scandal or casting-out from the university, as in Coetzee's Disgrace (as fine a novel as that is); Stoner's life merely resumes its tortoise-like pace, though his shell may be irreparably cracked. Even at the end, there is no rage against the dying of the light: instead, there is a static, almost unbearably touching final image that symbolizes the dignity, harmlessness and transience of a life led gently.

Perhaps most movingly of all, the life of William Stoner is chronicled in the purest, most crystalline prose. Stoner is so beautifully written that, when you emerge from it, you get the feeling that no-one else really writes in English. As a little amuse-bouche, here is a gorgeously melancholy moment after Stoner has been ostracised both at work and home:

He had come to the moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living: if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand from them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge; that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

Stoner is a quite exceptional work of twentieth-century literature and it beggars belief it isn't better known already. However, in a marketplace crammed with the Kentucky Fried Prose of Fifty Shades of Grey and Dan "the famous man looked at the red cup" Brown, it is so reassuring when a novel as wondrous and nourishing as this gets the commercial recognition it deserves. Dostoevsky once said that we all come out from Gogol's Overcoat (perhaps the literary work Stoner's sadness, simplicity and sense of inevitability echo the most). I'd suggest that everyone who reads Stoner will be absolutely astonished because it's basically the world in three hundred pages. Now tuck in.]]>